Beyond good and evil?

A few days ago Microsoft announced a large scale raid on the dynamic DNS service No-IP, as a result of which 22 of its domains were seized. The guys in Redmond said there were very good reasons for this: No-IP hosts all kinds of unpleasant malware; No-IP is a breeding ground of cybercriminals; No-IP is an epicenter for targeted attacks; and No-IP never agrees to working with anyone else on trying to root out all the badness.

Like in most conflicts, the sides have exchanged the contradictory volleys of announcements in the eternal tradition of ‘it’s his fault – no she started it’.

In particular, No-IP has said it’s a real goody-two-shoes and always willing to cooperate in eliminating sources of cyberattacks, while its clients are most displeased with the raid and consider it an illegal attack on legal business – since it’s possible to find malware practically anywhere, so interrupting services through a court is simply not on.

Is it legal to shut down a service because of #malware found?… When it can be found everywhere?…Tweet

In the meantime, the result of the raid has been rather far-reaching: more than four million sites were pulled, including both malicious and harmless ones – affecting 1.8 million users. Microsoft is trying to sieve the wheat from the chaff and get the clean sites back up and running; however, many users are still complaining about ongoing disruption.

To work out who’s to blame is a thankless and probably hopeless task. I’ll leave the journalistic investigations to… the journalists. Instead, here let me give you some food for thought: dry, raw facts and figures – so maybe/hopefully you’ll be able to come to your own conclusions about the legality and ethicality of MS’s actions, based on those facts and figures…

1) Shutting down 22 No-IP domains affected the operations of around 25% of the targeted attacks that we keep track of here at KL. That’s thousands of spy and cybercriminal operations ongoing for the last three years. Approximately a quarter of those have at least one command and control center (C&C) with this host. For example, hacker groups like the Syrian Electronic Army and Gaza Team use onlyNo-IP, while Turla uses it for 90% of its hosts.

2) We can confirm that out of all large providers the No-IP dynamic DNS was the most unwilling to cooperate. For example, they ignored all our emails about a botnet sinkhole.

3) Our analysis of current malware shows that No-IP is often used by the cyberswine for botnet control centers. A simple search via the Virustotal scanning engine confirms this fact with a cold hard figure: a total of 4.5 million unique malware samples sprout from No-IP.

4) However, the latest numbers from our security cloud (KSN) show something not quite so cut and dry. Here’s a table showing detections of cyberattacks from dozens of the largest dynamic DNS services:

Service

% of malicious hosts

Number of detections (in a week)

000webhost.com

89.47%

18,163

changeip.com

39.47%

89,742

dnsdynamic.org

37.04%

756

sitelutions.com

36.84%

199

no-ip.com

27.50%

29,382

dtdns.com

17.65%

14

dyn.com

11.51%

2321

smartdots.com

0.00%

0

oray.com

0.00%

0

dnserver.com

0.00%

0

So – No-IP isn’t leading in the number of detections, even though they’re still really high compared to most.

Here’s some more info for comparison: the % of malware hosts in the .com zone makes up 0.03% of the total; in the .ru zone – 0.39%; but in No-IP the figure’s 27.5%!

And now for other figures that add a bit of a different perspective: in one week, malware domains on No-IP generated around 30,000 detections, while in the same week on one of the most malicious domains in the .com zone, the figure was 429,000 – almost 14 times higher. Also: the tenth most infected domain in the .ru zone generated 146,000 detections – that is, about the same as the first ten providers of dynamic DNS mentioned above put together!

To summarize…

On the one hand, blocking popular services that are used by thousands – if not millions – of typical users: it ain’t right. On the other hand, closing spawning grounds for malware is right – and noble.

The takedown of No-IP domains. Was it right or wrong? Ambiguity with a big ATweet

But then mathematics takes on the role of devil’s advocate, and proves:

Quantitatively, closing all the domains of No-IP is no more effective in combatting the distribution of malware than closing one single top malware domain in one of the popular zones, i.e., .com, .net, or even .ru. Simpler put, even if you were to shut down all providers of dynamic DNS – the Internet still wouldn’t become ‘cleaner’ enough to notice the difference.

So there you have it – ambiguity with a big A.

It leaves anyone in their right and honest-with-themselves mind to admit things are far from black and white here, and as regards the right and wrong, or good and bad, or Nietzsche’s thing – who can tell?

Still, another thought comes to mind at some point while reflecting on all this…

It’s further evidence that as soon as the quantity of piracy or degree of criminality gets above a certain threshold, the ‘powers that be’ get involved all of a sudden and start closing services, ignoring any notions of Internet freedom or freedom to do business. It’s just the way things are, a rule of life of human society: If it stinks, sooner or later it’ll get cleaned up.

The list of blocked services is already rather long: Napster, KaZaA, eMule, Pirate Bay and so on. Now No-IP‘s been added to the list.

There are a great many beautiful and unusual towns and cities in the world, there are volcanoes, there are valleys and canyons, and islands and lakes. There are also of course rivers: loads of them – all different. There are the grandiose, like the super-wide Amazon with its adjacent jungles, anacondas, piranhas, crocodiles and other […]

A few words about the vehicle that transported us about in Utah. And let’s not forget the super chauffeur… Here she is, a classic of the genre, giving the Land Rover Defender a run for its money: the Toyota Land Cruiser. Quite an old one at that. Only demonstrates the ruggedness of this remarkable 4×4: […]

Why this national park is called the Arches is a rhetorical question. But if you haven’t been following this mini-on-the-road series from Utah, then read this. Yes, you want huge natural rock arches – you need to come here. There’s just so much awesome archness here. Wikipedia says there are as many as 2000 here, […]

The red rocks of Utah – a simply captivating sight; from the outside, that is, which is what we checked out yesterday. Today it was time we had a look at all this from the inside. So off we headed to the Arches National Park‘s Fiery Furnace rocky massif. This is what we saw…

Since the previous day my brain had been variously boggling and boiling. This was eased a little by steam being emitted from said boggling and boiling brain out via my camera, but that alleviation process then went too far, leading poor brain into a state of half dehydration. The diagnosis sounds like this: I’ve (finally) […]

There are many ways to make up something sensationalist in the media. One of the practical ways is to speculate and create conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, there’s a demand for such stories and they have a very good chance of making a splash. So how can a global company with Russian roots play a part in […]

More

DISCLAIMER

This blog reflects Eugene Kaspersky
private position and is not official
position of the company